Add Your URL

Randy Seaver posted on Genea-Musings not long ago about including the URL of each blog post within the blog. His main reason in that particular article was because of his iPhone. Apparently, from within his RSS reader (Google Reader, I believe), there was no way to go to the original blog post in order to see more from the blog or to leave a comment. He suggested leaving the URL within the post so that it could be clicked for those reasons.

I have another reason. Yesterday, one of my blog posts was copied in its entirety on three separate blogs. These weren’t even the typical genealogy sploggers. They were seemingly random sploggers who just copied posts on a variety of subjects. I didn’t try to find a connection. But I think that once one of them copied it, then the others picked it up possibly just from each other.

How did I find them? Two ways. Google Alerts told me about one. The other two reported back to my blog as pingbacks, meaning, those blogs mentioned my blog post and informed my blog about them. Because they copied the URL of my blog from within the article.

Have my articles been copied before? I hadn’t seen them on some previously found genealogy splogs, but there are obviously hundreds if not more other blogs just stealing content. And for no good reason. They weren’t trying to be topical and they had no advertising, or very little. It’s just pointless and blatant stealing.

For the record, the Posterous site was shut down in less than a day. The other two are anonymous domain registrations, so no one is going to shut them down easily.